From the center, often compared to NASA’s Mission Control or the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, Managing Director Jim DeYoung oversees the facility’s far-reaching operations that touch all of the airline’s flight-related activity and ultimately affect the traveling experience of every passenger on United’s more than 5,000 daily flights to some 360 airports on every continent except Antarctica.

Opening in the summer of 2012 shortly after the United-Continental Airlines merger, the 52,000-square-foot Network Operations Center — known as the “NOC” and pronounced “nock” — has its own set of technological superlatives. Information is fed to the NOC and sorted through 120 miles of Ethernet cables, experts staff 360 desks while 60 large flatscreen displays keep everyone updated on every aspect of the airline’s operation ranging from weather in Europe to baggage claim in Beijing. In all, about 1,100 employees work the 24-hour operation in shifts.

United’s NOC is a newcomer to downtown Chicago; for many decades the airline’s nerve center pulsed at its former headquarters in suburban Elk Grove Village. NOC honcho DeYoung, however, is no newcomer to aviation.

“I’ve always been fascinated by airplanes and flying,” he says. “There are many pilots in my family; my dad was in the Air Force. I took flying lessons in high school.” DeYoung says a college professor steered him toward airline management and flight dispatch. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautics, he was hired by Trans States in St. Louis, a TWA-associated commuter airline, where he became a crew scheduler, then a flight dispatcher and operations manager.

“In 2000, I was hired by United. I’ve been with the airline almost 14 years, and worked my way up into manager of flight dispatch and then (managing director) of the Network Operations Center,” DeYoung says.

The traveling public might have the wrong idea about what goes on at the NOC, with visions of personnel hunched over glowing radar screens. That form of air traffic control takes place in radar facilities run by the Federal Aviation Administration, which is in constant contact with the nation’s airlines.

What comes into United’s nerve center, however, is an avalanche of data from multiple sources — not only from the FAA’s air traffic controllers, but from much, much more. “The NOC coordinates all of the day-to-day flight activity and associated logistics to get aircraft from point A to point B,” DeYoung says. Some, but not all, of those operations include crew scheduling, flight dispatch and air traffic management, weather forecasting, aircraft routing, maintenance, and coordination with customer service and United Express.

According to DeYoung, most NOC departments are organized by fleet, by the aircraft type for which they’ll be responsible. For example, on its shift a single team — operations manager, router, crew scheduler, maintenance, customer service coordinator — might be responsible for the airline’s fleet of Boeing 737 aircraft. “If anything irregular pops up, say, a maintenance issue, or a weather diversion, they’re all working together to recover the flight,” DeYoung says.

Every day is different at the NOC; just about anything can and does pop up. For example, on the day of DeYoung’s interview for this article (a Monday), his team kept busy monitoring a weather system bringing snow to Chicago that the NOC’s experts had predicted — and anticipated — would hit Cleveland and then Washington, D.C., and New York on Tuesday and into Wednesday.

Result: The NOC mobilized its resources to respond to the above-normal snowfall and the potential for slow operations. Because the NOC is constantly collecting and analyzing data from myriad sources such as GPS satellites, ground-based and airborne sensors, cameras at airports, pilot observations and FAA air traffic control, the airline can quickly make strategic decisions in response to changing conditions.

“We have tools that our air traffic coordinators and managers can utilize to model the impact of air traffic control delays on an airport,” DeYoung explains. “For example, Newark is a very (air traffic control)-restrained airport and can handle about 40 landings and takeoffs per hour. When snow hits, we have to plan to increase the (time) separation between airplanes. We also have to plan on one of the runways being closed for snow removal. That means a lower number of arrivals or departures — that figure can drop from 40 to 32 or even 28.”

When an airport can no longer accommodate the usual number of takeoffs and landings, airline schedules are affected. That’s when the NOC uses its resources to help identify critical flights that may require priority based on customer connections, crew work restrictions or aircraft routings.

In these situations, computer technology comes into play. “In a matter of minutes, our automated rebooking systems can get a customer into the next available seat,” DeYoung says. “If not, the system can alert us to the need to find alternate travel. This happens a lot faster than in the past. In a mouse click, I can find out the status of a flight based on crew, maintenance or connections for customers. We can tactically better manage our flights. In the past, all of this information was in disparate systems.”

Airlines never make these changes lightly. “We don’t cancel a flight until we’ve exhausted every other possibility,” DeYoung says.

While praising the vast array of technology on display at the NOC, both DeYoung and Tim Matuszewski, senior manager of domestic air traffic systems, emphasize the importance of the human factor.

“Automation has its place, but people are still important,” Matuszewski says. “You always need to be like a free safety in football and be prepared to move to your left or right. You have an area of responsibility and you have to be ready to respond to the unexpected. Automation simply can’t account for so many variables.”

A 28-year United veteran, Matuszewski joined the airline in 1985 as a meteorologist. He obtained a dispatch license in 1990 because dispatching used a lot of weather components, then took on management responsibilities in 2001, becoming manager of domestic air traffic systems. In 2005 he took on meteorology when the airline decided to outsource meteorology. (He no longer oversees weather due to internal reorganization.)

Matuszewski, who is United’s point of contact with the FAA air traffic controllers, has seen a lot of technological innovations during his time in the Friendly Skies. “When I first began at the airline in 1985, we were just then getting the ability to do the radar loop — and now we see those on TV,” he says. “The technology has exploded in the past 30 years. We’ve gone from having dispatchers with a keyboard and one screen to now having four screens, as well as different charts and maps.”

Matuszewski says one of the biggest changes is the ability to follow where aircraft are in real time. “When I started, we knew where they were supposed to be, but we had to chart them and didn’t have a graphic display.”

United’s air traffic control desk was just beginning in 1985 — and consisted of one person. Today there are four. Part of that is due to the United-Continental merger, but Matuszewski says this is mainly due to the evolution of the Collaborative Decision Making program, created in the 1990s by the airlines and FAA. That collaboration not only involves grater exchange of technical data, but daily conferences to discuss how traffic and weather are affecting airspace and airports, and determine how best to manage the constraints.

“We are not controllers,” Matuszewski is quick to remind the public. Air traffic controllers — the folks in those towers and at those radar screens — work for the FAA, and through Matuszewski, the NOC and United decision-makers are in constant contact.

Glen Martin, the FAA’s terminal district manager for the area that includes 12 facilities from Moline to South Bend, and then Milwaukee, Green Bay, Madison and Chicago, clarifies what his personnel do, as well. “The misconception is that we are telling airplanes how to get from point A to point B. Only the pilots do that,” Martin says. “Our role is providing safety, separation from planes and terrain, and sequencing.”

Air traffic control is surprisingly recent — its first use in the U.S. was in Cleveland in 1930. That technology by today’s standards was quite primitive, and supplanted within a few years by more advanced, electronically assisted methods.

“One of the great innovations was radar tracking,” Martin says. “Once we could see where the planes really were, that gave us a lot more ability to provide safety.”

Another innovation has been advancement of navigation technology, the ability of aircraft to fly more direct routes, to fly safely in increasingly bad weather and to reach difficult airports between mountains, he notes.

“Weather tracking and forecasting also have made a big difference in aviation, being able to see possible impacts and determining how to respond to them and operate safely,” Martin says.

There’s even more innovation ahead, Martin says. By 2025, the U.S. is expected to have rolled out the Next Generation Air Transportation System, which will shift from ground-based to satellite technology. Some hardware and software systems already are in place and almost at full deployment, he notes.

Recently, a private research group, the Aviation Safety Network, said that the world’s airlines had one of the safest years on record in 2013 and a record-low total number of fatalities. Innovative technology that allows the FAA and airlines to quickly share information has certainly played a part in this.

“From an (air traffic control) perspective, our information sharing has meant a significant improvement in safety,” Martin says. “That includes security issues. We have all the right players at hand 24 hours a day to address any security concerns ranging from an unruly passenger to something more serious.”

“What we’ve been able to do is marry with them, largely on an electronic and computer basis, the sharing of weather and other information.”

The FAA and airlines are in 24-hour touch, but talk most frequently during the busiest travel times. Every two hours from 5 a.m. through around 11 p.m. Eastern time, the FAA has conference calls with the airlines’ operations centers. Discussion centers on the entire United States — and beyond, if required.

The FAA personnel express their view of the weather and traffic, namely, where are things going to run normally and where at reduced rates dues to weather, runway outages or equipment breakdown. Based on this information sharing, Martin says, “The airlines then use their own business models to determine how to handle those situations.”

In United’s case, those determinations are made thanks to the information collected and analyzed by DeYoung, Matuszewski and the men and women of the NOC.

“Airlines are data rich and we’ve reached a point where we’ve been able to streamline that data and put it in front of our decision-makers so we’re making better choices for our customers,” DeYoung concludes.

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